5 Key Highlights From the Second Chapter of Elon Musk’s Master Plan

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has been pursuing the economic dream of sustaining a better future for about ten years now. While from the exterior, it looks like the technology leader is dominating the future to come, Musk’s establishments haven’t been able to generate respectable profit quarters yet. However, they’ve achieved their core target which involves maintaining enough funds to keep going and conjunct more products to their electric automobiles roadmap as well as pushing the solar energy sector forward.

Despite constant deadline pitfalls and acquisitions, Tesla is still standing straight and is better than ever, their Model 3 received almost 400,000 registrations crowning it as one of the most successful cars in the US. They’ve been continuously expanding factories and the extremely criticized autopilot function certainly, looks promising. But that was the past. Elon Musk, in a blog post, revealed a bunch of new and upcoming strategies Tesla will be implementing. Hence, here are the top 5 highlights from the second chapter of Musk’s Master plan for creating a better world.

1. A Commercial Solar Roof and Possible Unification of Tesla and SolarCity

For delivering solar-powered connections to everyone, Musk has outlined a justified plan that involves the customer himself generating as well as utilizing energy captured from the sun. Consequently, Tesla is currently working on a “beautiful” solar roof product that will act as a catalyst for empowering every individual to benefit from it. Additionally, as the panel’s capabilities and working will be considerably sublime from solutions and products available now, users won’t have to deal with any technical glitches on a regular basis, as Elon puts it – “a product that just works”. There will be also a smartphone app which will possibly show you statistics, troubleshooting and service options. Details are intact as of now. Although, you might have heard of an another venture of Elon Musk called SolarCity which primarily focuses on developing a public solar plant, so why is Tesla building a solar roof? Well, that’s mostly because SolarCity is not really a product company.

Elon Musk, however, does understand conflicts here and has placed a proposition to inherit combined resources from Tesla and SolarCity. Given the mutual goals of sustainable energy, it makes perfect sense to fabricate both startups together and it will eventually happen in the coming months or years. These are just overviews of what Elon is envisioning, hence, no one knows for sure when these agendas will go official.

2. Entering the Terrestrial Transport Business

Tesla is right now limited to premium automobiles that include sedans and costlier SUVs. But in order to really break into the industry, Elon Musk is planning to unveil a couple of more transport mediums including a compact or mini SUV and a unique kind of pickup truck along with large-scale production of the Model 3. For keeping deliveries in mind, Tesla will be further upgrading their factory machines with the second iteration scheduled for 2018.

3. Two Additional Vehicles for Reducing Cargo Transport Costs

Moreover, Musk will be also entering the cargo and public transport grounds with two new mobiles – Heavy-duty trucks and high passenger density urban transport, basically something inspired from a bus. Both of these products are in the early development periods and will see mass manufacturing limelight sometime next year. As these facilities will work solely on electricity, overall costs will significantly be lowered and will be apparently, “fun” to operate. Although, in my opinion, initial investments won’t be cheap at all.

In addition to foreseeing a major tariff reduction, autonomy will allow the engineers to dwindle buses’ surface and size. As there won’t be any drivers, the command will be shifted to fleet’s head manager. Moreover, this will greatly enhance bus’ accommodation and acceleration. In the starting phases, these transports will be locked to a particular destination and won’t follow the usual stop and pickup guidelines. Elon also mentions that they’ll be installing summon buttons for people who don’t own or are unable to efficiently use smartphones which could be ideal for specifically, elders.

4. Autonomy Progress

The Deux Part’s blueprint also discusses Tesla’s autonomy progress and is pointing at substantial chances of getting approved. Every automobile Tesla launches will be deeply linked with the independent controls which will take charge in case of a system failure and essentially, drive the car automatically. The post also states that this won’t be an elementary job and requires a lot of effort apart from placing in the necessary hardware components. The feature will be regulated once tested for over 6 Billion miles (~10 Billion kilometers). As of now, numbers have reached marginally over 3 Million miles per day. Elon, additionally, claims that the automated guidance is a way superior to humans and failure rates have been gradually improving, according to the most recent report, it stands around one death every 89 million miles.

5. Your very own Car Pooling Agency

Since a Tesla can be automated to travel anywhere through a bunch of taps, every owner will be able to extract regular income by lending their car to strangers as a shared fleet. This can be done while you’re at work or vacation. Elon also mentions that customers can buy a car keeping this in mind which will eventually empower the individual to retain the entire purchasing costs. Everything will be accessible through a standard mobile app meaning you can even personally direct your vehicle to pick up a relative from the airport and other related activities.

Musk’s projects for the coming years do sound exceedingly ambitious but sooner or later, everything will happen. After all, no one thought Tesla would make it this far regardless of forecasting any outstanding profits at all. It will, although, take a numerous amount of time and effort from even the industry itself, for actually formulating these roadmaps into reality and delivering sustainable energy to the masses. As of now, we can only wait for Tesla’s next big announcement. I do hope they get a little better at completing tasks before deadlines.

Shubham Agarwal Author Shubham started as an intern with Technology Personalized and later graduated to be a full-time author. He dabs with both features and news posts. Currently based out of Ahmedabad, India, Shubham holds an engineering degree in Computer Science, while specializing in mobile applications.